Oh, I know what points are being made -- again and again.
Creation against erasure and etc. Bravo. But they seem like slogans to
me-- communicated in a way quite conventional now and even in the beginning
not exactly thrilling.
And that world as it is includes a ballet for artichokes (I suppose) and
performance pieces intended to make the usual philosophical, theoretical and
so on points, and this and that quite easy to do and justified by changing
the frame. That's one version of the world as it is. Very intellectual.
Beside the point mostly, I think. And a quite easy way to do "art." And do
many care? No, this is beyond them..
And Tippy the Little Meadow Mouse has nothing whatever to say:
As demonstrated here in this verse o'mine.
*Alienation Effect*
As that dreadful
East German, Brecht
Has written one must
Make it strange.
Ostraneniye!
Viewing It all from a new angle
Like this a poem about
A cat writing a poem
By me, Tippy, a little
Meadow Mouse. So
Here goes! What if I?
No, that won't work
Or I could, ah, that's
So done and done.
I know! As soon as
You finish reading
This poem, me, Tippy,
A little meadow mouse
Right now clinging to
The ledge of the Reichstag
As the Red Army advances
Under me will throw myself
Off this horrible building
Down under the treads
Of a Soviet T-34 tank there
To be squished.
This is the cat
Speaking.**
On Nov 28, 2007 6:44 PM, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> <snip>
> "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still
> boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one
> discovers that it is not boring at all." --John Cage.
>
> Yes, tends to reconcile one to the world as it is. Very motivational.
> I think Dale Carnegie said it first tho --in "How to Stop Worrying
> and Start Living." [JG]
> <snip>
>
> Actually that is precisely _not_ the point: 'this intolerable world'.
>
> Cage told this story of a reading from *Diary: How to Improve the World
> (You
> Will Only Make Matters Worse)*: Cage read; audience listened. Observing
> that
> the sheaf of pages in his hand was beginning to diminish, some showed
> signs
> of relief. Finally the last page was reached. Cage picked up another
> sheaf...
>
> Which is comparable, in a way, to Enzo Del Re, an Italian radical singer
> (*Lavorare con lentezza*: *Work Slowly*) of the 70s. He used a chair for
> percussion (an electric one had been used to execute the anarchists Saccho
> and Vanzetti in 1920) and played for as long as it took. As long as it
> took,
> that is, for the final audience member to get up and leave the room,
> *winning* being a matter of who could hold out the longest. (More recently
> he has, I believe, composed a ballet for artichokes or something of that
> sort; but that's another story.)
>
> But this is only a (smallish) part of what's implied. Creation against
> erasure ('the wrong end of the pencil'), attention changed through length
> (in this sense reconciliation would be the _absence_ of attention; indeed
> the best known example of Satie's *furniture music* may be *Vexations*)
> and
> the dissolution of composition (*music* not *composition*, of course: use
> rather than ownership) are just three others.
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the
> Pilgrims' (piece by David Rosenboom 1969-72)
>
--
Joseph Green
The Pleasant Reviewer
Headmaster, St. John Boscoe Laboratory School
Switchboard Captain, Hollywood Colonial Hotel
All complaints shall be directed to:
Camelopard Breathwaite
The Fallows, 200 Fifth Avenue, Fredonia City
"That's Double Dependability"
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